Immediate feedback does suffer, but errors have a way of being pointed out and corrected, after a short period of time. There are a handful of pedantic and extremely knowledgeable folks around these parts who are quick to point out better ways to do things. The rest of us point out other ways to do things, sometimes, in the guise of Perl golf or exploring weird tricks.

If new posters have the expectation that they'll get a good answer within 12 to 18 hours, I think they'll do okay. (If they grab the first answer, they may be in for a bit of a shock -- but on the whole, most of the answers here are good.)

Often (usually?) led by you. Both in speed-of-response and
overall quality, chromatic often leads the rest. Though I
often find myself a bit frustrated that a question I would
love to answer has already been (yet once again) answered
before I could even read it, I applaud you and the many
others who contribute selflessly to this community.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other